Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
Fair point, outside my rose coloured memories of Windows 2000, it was likely never a beacon of stability. This is all purely subjective, but in my, frankly not always very reliable memory, I still have the distinct feeling that what has changed is the "in version progression" for lack of a better term.
A fresh install of a later Service Pack Windows XP or Vista did, again purely in my recollection, behaved a lot more stably on the same system to a fresh install of an earlier instance.
8.1 also is of particular note (unpopular UX not withstanding), it worked incredibly solidly on a Netbook with a big colourful sticker proudly proclaiming an entire Gigabyte of memory back in the day, even when using it for image editing via GIMP, for what it's worth.
What I find somewhat humorous: AMD originally wanted to acquire Nvidia, but walked away when Jensen apparently insisted on becoming the CEO of the merged company.
I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
> only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.
Zen1 was further behind in ST perf than Intel is today in it's desktop offerings. They really exploited their strength in MT and price, and showed that the market was already chafing under Intel's reluctance to go beyond 4 cores on their consumer line, presumably to avoid stepping on the toes of HEDT. But that just caused the competition to pretty much invalidate that entire line instead.
And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
> And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
Hindsight is 20/20. I suspect Zen chiplet success was a result of AMD's deliberate strategy of design partnership with other companies (XBox, PlayStation) and re-using IP[1]. Jensen might not have done the same road on partnerships, or may have chosen the Arm (Tegra) over doubling down on x86
1. There's an informative interview with Lisa Hsu from 2 years ago that lays out the strategy. It's not a big leap to imagine Infinity Fabric eas designed to increase design flexibility across disparate workloads. The impression I got from the multistage Apple-Nvida fallout is that Nvidia probably doesn't have a culture of accepting notes on it's products.
Considering that these tools are installed in seismically active areas [0], the last thing a customer would want is for the tool to zeroise itself because of an earthquake.
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
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